Listening Skills in children with and without cochlear implants

描述(由申请者提供)：该项目的长期目标是全面了解儿童听觉信息处理的能力和局限性，听觉处理技能的发展，以及听力障碍、耳聋和人工耳蜗术的使用对发育过程的影响。该项目目前的重点是儿童使用的将期望的听觉信号从干扰声音中分离出来的策略。到目前为止的结果表明，大多数幼儿在简单的检测任务和需要注意目标言语信息的任务中，在有其他言语干扰的情况下，表现出显著的不能执行这种分离的能力。数据还显示，来源分离能力存在很大的个体差异，一些青少年表现出孩子般的表现，一些年幼的学龄儿童表现出成年人的表现。成人-儿童的差异与我的结果非常一致。这项新工作还解决了植入人工耳蜗的儿童和成人面临的特殊选择性注意问题，并评估了增强选择性注意的策略。听觉选择性注意被量化为四种任务：1)简单信号检测，其中目标信号被随机的多分量音调复合体掩盖；2)语音基频辨别任务；3)语音识别任务，有说话者的视觉表征和没有说话者的视觉表征；4)空间分离任务，其中目标信息和分心者在空间上分离。第一个任务的目的是在一个简单的单参数模型的约束下量化听觉选择性注意。第二个任务将产生一个说话者相似性的量表，然后用它来预测说话者相似性在选择性注意任务中的影响。第三和第四个任务探索可以增强选择性注意的方法。这个项目的总体重要性在于它研究了日常生活中常见的沟通情况。对于正在发展语言和语言能力的儿童来说，嘈杂环境中的言语交流是一个特别重要的问题，该项目的结果将增加关于儿童和成年人如何解决这一问题的重要新知识。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long term goal of this program is a complete understanding of the capabilities and limitations of auditory information processing in children, the development of auditory processing skills, and how that developmental course may be affected by hearing impairment, deafness, and the use of a cochlear mplant. The current focus of the project is on the strategies used by children to segregate desired auditory signals from interfering sounds. Results to date suggest that most young children display a remarkable nability to perform this segregation in simple detection tasks and in tasks requiring attention to a target speech message in the presence of other speech distracters. The data also reveal large individual differences in source segregation ability, with some teenagers demonstrating child-like performance, and some young school-aged children demonstrating adult-like performance. The adult-child differences are argely consistent with what iresults. The new work also addresses the special selective attention problems faced by children and adults with cochlear implants and evaluates strategies by which selective attention can be enhanced. Auditory selective attention is quantified in four kinds of tasks: 1) simple signal detection, in which the target signal is masked by random multicomponent tonal complexes; 2) a speech fundamental frequency discrimination task; 3) speech recognition tasks, both with and without a visual representation of the speaker; 4) spatial segregation tasks in which the target message and the distracter are spatially separated. The aim of the first task is to quantify auditory selective attention within the constraints of a simple one-parameter model. The second task will produce a scale of talker similarity which will then be used to predict the impact of talker similarity in the selective attention tasks. The third and fourth tasks explore means by which selective attention can be enhanced, eithssessed. The overall importance of this project lies in its study of communication situations common in everyday life. Speech communication in noisy environments is an especially important issue for children who are developing speech and language, and the results of this project will add important new knowledge about how children and adults are able to address this issue.